Today Google’s The Chromium Blog announced that the developer version of Chrome will come with Adobe’s Flash Player pre-installed and I think this is some of the best news that any web designer or developer could hear. Why is it a big deal? If Flash Player comes pre-installed on all of the main browsers, you’ll know that you’re Flash content will be guaranteed to be accessible to close to 100% of Internet users. No more need to check what version they have, the browsers would be able to update Flash Player automatically. And Adobe would be able to work with each browser maker to tweak Flash Player to run better, custom versions wouldn’t be that big of a deal if the Google or Mozilla worked with Adobe on improving Flash Player.

If you read the blog post on The Chromium Blog, don’t bother reading the comments, instead of an intelligent debate about whether Google is moving in the right direction, it’s just a lot of blather from what is becoming the HTML5 “tea party”. I really don’t understand the hate for Flash nor the absolute certainty that HTML5 is better and going to be a replacement. I’ll use the best option, whether it’s Flash or something else. Dismissing one out right makes no sense to me.

I’ve been saying that the browsers should do this for a while now and I’m not surprised that it was Google that did it first. If Mozilla does it with Firefox, than I’m sure that the others will follow. Flash is a great technology and if companies like Google get involved, I’m pretty excited about how much better it can get. These are great days for the Internet and we shouldn’t ruin it by turning everything into this vs that battles.

I'm Mike Thomas and I spend most of my time making things using HTML/CSS/JS. I'm currently obsessed with HTML5, JavaScript and jQuery. Sometimes I say something interesting on Twitter, I put code up on github and I post interesting stuff on Google+. And check out my RSS feed so you don't miss anything.